Kaze: Do You Believe Henry Miller?

Writing the other day about what consciousness may or may not be like—and by extension, how remarkable it is that out of the unfathomable electrochemical goo that is the brain, occasionally comes a book—I was reminded of a quote I’d once jotted down by Henry Miller, famous/notorious 20th-century writer and sybarite. It appeared in one of those Paris Review interviews with notable writers—this one in Issue 28, back in 1962:

“What is an artist? He’s a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos; he merely has the facility for hooking on, as it were. Who is original? Everything that we are doing, everything that we think, exists already, and we are only intermediaries, that’s all, who make use of what is in the air. Why do ideas, why do great scientific discoveries often occur in different parts of the world at the same time? The same is true of the elements that go to make up a poem or a great novel or any work of art. They are already in the air, they have not been given voice, that’s all. They need the man, the interpreter, to bring them forth.”

At first glance this sounds humble: I’m just a radio set picking up signals at sea. But look again and it’s more like the how-grand-I-am Henry Miller we know from his work: It’s not just anybody who could pick up the signals: “They need the man, the interpreter, to bring them forth.”

It’s a very romantic notion: The artist is a heroic figure, chosen somehow to play the part of receiving Truth on the world’s behalf and passing it along to the rest of us. I don’t know if it’s true, but Miller—who lived to age 88 in Paris, Greece, Big Sur, mostly in the company of adoring women—seems to have made the most of it.